In traditional contact centers, all agents in an outbound calling campaign are generally considered the same and will be delivered the next outbound call attempt which is successfully answered by a customer in the order that the agents becomes available. In more sophisticated contact centers, the agents may be ranked for outbound calls by skill level and/or idle time. This approach, however, does not optimize the matching of the skills and abilities of the agent with the unique needs of the person being called and, therefore, only achieves average results.
Meanwhile, outbound dialers are currently optimized to minimize idle time and outbound dialers are paced in order to attempt to perfectly synchronize the answering of outbound call attempts with the availability of agents to service those calls. Additional details of a contact center employing such a pacing function is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,035,927 to Flockhart et al., the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference.
Existing outbound solutions are optimized for efficiency, but not for effectiveness or matching the compatibility of agent and customer. Existing outbound solutions also do not attempt to match dialed customers (e.g., customers of outbound contacts) with agents who are the best available to deal with the specific needs of the dialed customer.